Breast-feeding in the Back Pew

Why are we so uncomfortable when nursing mothers imitate God in church?

Rachel Marie Stone/ December 12, 2012

Breast-feeding in the Back Pew

Why are we so uncomfortable when nursing mothers imitate God in church?

Rachel Marie Stone/ December 12, 2012

This Christmas, many of us will strive once again to reflect on the significance of the Incarnation. We will try to remember, amid the usual busyness, the strange wonder of God coming to earth as a baby, of an unwed teenager carrying God-in-the-flesh in her flesh.

If it is remarkable that an ordinary woman carried our Savior in her body, it is equally so that she nourished him with that same body—specifically with her breasts.

Our world looks so different from first-century Palestine. Today an unmarried pregnant woman does not fear the public embarrassment that Joseph spared Mary, and a baby would be born in a stable only in an absolute emergency. If he had followed the customs of the time, Joseph wouldn't have attended Jesus' birth. Yet for all the ways modern Western culture seem brazenly relaxed compared with the culture of Jesus' time, there is one act we're more squeamish about, especially in our worship spaces.

Early this year, a Georgia woman claimed she was kicked out of worship for breast-feeding her infant. I know a bit of what she must have felt: On a family trip to St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, as I started to breast-feed my son in the sanctuary, I was whisked away by a security guard to the bathroom. Countless other Christian women, trying to feed their children without having to miss a sermon, have faced the disapproval of others who think breasts have no place in the sanctuary.

How widespread the no-breast-feeding rule is in U.S. churches is hard to say. But one thing's clear: Our squeamishness over breast-feeding has little precedent in the church. Instead, Christians have long celebrated this aspect of Jesus' early life. Church father Ephrem the Syrian ...

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